Thursday, 26 May 2011

Status on Steam game downloads: slow as hell. I don't know what's bogging me down (though I'm keen on blaming my roommates), but my downloads have been at a crawl. I'll have to postpone the game news until tomorrow.

Hm. Apparently attempting to expand a partition that contains your OS can cause that partition to become corrupt. Or at least, that's what happened to me.

My face when I had to do a complete reinstall,

losing all my data.

But hey, what can you do. It's my own damn fault. At any rate, I'm currently redownloading all my games and considering a few new ones to try. The sad part is, I've lost all my saves - ME2, Bioshock 2, Terraria, just to name a few.

Shit sucks. Anyway, I'll make a post in a little while with my decision on a game, and possibly some in-game screenshots of me actually playing!

P.S. BigMike of Today I Quit Smoking raised a valid question that I should probably address. It's my own fault because when I did the partition a while ago, I made it JUST big enough for the system folders to go in. This wouldn't have caused a problem, except that I was attempting to install a game whose self-extractor was creating a temporary folder there without a way to change it. I figured it would be simple to go in and just expand the allocated space, and...well, you know the rest. :)

Tuesday, 24 May 2011

Sorry about vanishing yesterday after telling you all I was going to be making a post. Got caught up in a bit of a family-related event that I had to deal with. I'm back now, though, and better than ever - and with that game suggestion that I promised!

A small selection of character options in LoL.

Note Cho'Gath (far right), he's a badass.

Some of you might already know about this game. Some of you may have played it in the past, or some of you might play its competition, Heroes of Newerth. Either way, it's a great game for an introduction to the world of DotA (Defense of the Ancients, a map for Warcraft III, the Frozen Throne)-like games due to its free to play nature. The game itself is similar in style to HoN and DotA, but with a couple of small differences. The possibility to hit your own creeps, which are the means that the enemy team levels up and a slight defence for your towers from enemies and enemy creeps, in order to prevent your enemies from gaining experience from that kill has been removed. The towers also do a HEAP of damage at low level, and even at higher levels it can still take huge chunks off your HP. These two things combined make it so the game is a lot more forgiving - you can retreat to tower range and not be tower-dived and killed by a beefy champion, and not having to last-hit not only your enemies' creeps, but also your own, removes a good piece of the intense micromanagement in the other games.

Another important difference is the character unlocking. Not all of the characters are unlocked from the start - champions rotate every week, giving you (almost forcing you if you don't have the influence points (more on this in a moment) to purchase them) a chance to play more than a single group of champions that you might pick on a steady basis. Influence points are used to purchase characters, awarded by both winning and losing games against other players or bots. Riot Games has a point exchange system as well - you can purchase Riot Points in certain tiers for money, but it isn't necessary to do so. All characters can be unlocked with IP and a bit of patience.

The final gameplay changer is the meta game - Masteries and Runes. Masteries work like a talent tree from MMOs, giving you access to different talents for your character to use. These tie in with several usable 'Summoner Spells' that can assist your character, like Ghost, which grants temporary movement speed and removes unit collision, and Exhaust, which slows enemy champions and causes their hits to miss more frequently. Both are good escape mechanisms, and are amongst several other spells that you may select pre-game to assist you.

The Masteries page - this build is what an offensive

spellcaster would look like.

Runes are a similar story to masteries, except that they are purchased through IP and only IP. Riot Points cannot be used to unlock them, as Riot Games does not wish to 'directly sell power', as they put it. Their effects are permanent until changed, and range all stats and utilities.

The Rune Page window, empty for the moment.

All in all, I would say that League of Legends is a good introductory game if you aren't willing to pay the price for either Warcraft III or HoN, or aren't willing to wait for DotA II's release in the future. Personally, I play the game because, while I enjoy it and am now familiar with the genre as a whole, I'm not willing to pay the money for HoN for several reasons that I won't go into in this post. Each game has its downfalls, but for me, League of Legends' ups outweigh its downs. I highly recommend this game to anyone who has never tried it - or if you've stopped playing, get back in the swing!

Monday, 23 May 2011

The only thing I don't like about winter in Ontario is that we never, ever have any thunderstorms. I suppose it's all the cold weather fronts never meeting with any warm ones, but for the 5 or 6 months that winter is in full effect, any precipitation falls in the form of snow. This in itself is fine - I love snow and the way that the surrounding area looks during winter - but I do miss the heavy rainfall and thunderstorms of spring and summer.

Last night was a refresher for me. A huge thunderstorm rolled in and for most of the evening there was lots of thunder and lightning, though none of it seemed very close by. The ditches were close to flooding with all the rainfall, though apparently the streets were flooded further downtown. Good thing I live on a big hill.

Plenty of strikes just like this one.

I watched the storm for awhile until the winds picked up and the rain was going more horizontal than vertical, and was soaking me even beneath the little roof above my front door. We didn't lose power completely, but it did flicker for a bit, which is really too bad. There's always been something really cool to me about completely losing power during a storm for extended periods of time. Remember the northeast blackout back in 2003? That was awesome. Similar weather is supposedly going to hit again tonight, so I'm very much looking forward to that!

I'll be posting again later today with a new game suggestion, and a bit of information on it. In the meantime, my grass is so long that wild pokemon have started wondering around in it. Hopefully the lawnmower has enough gas to go for an hour. I don't want to use scissors again...

Sunday, 22 May 2011

A new episode of Game of Thrones will be airing tonight at 9:00 EST on HBO. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've fallen in love with the show. I'd wanted to pick up the series it was based on for awhile, but now I'm going to wait until the show has run its course. I don't want to ruin anything, and I already have plethora of other things to read anyway.

Ned Stark, Lord and all around WINNER

For those of you who have never seen the show, I would highly recommend watching it - though it would be best, if possible, to pick the series up from the beginning to avoid getting lost further down the line. There's a lot that has already happened in the early episodes (I believe we're on episode 6 now) and without having seen it, following the rest of the plot could be difficult.

On a different note, I've reached the first milestone of 20 followers! Next stop - 50! If and when I make it to 100, I'll do something special like a random giveaway or something of the sorts. Tell your friends!

Followers

About Me

Hi! Thanks for taking the time to visit my blog! I'm a 20 year old guy from Ontario, Canada with interests in gaming, outdoor activities and literature. I'll be blogging (almost) daily about all these things, and I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I enjoy writing them. :)